First Day of Spring

Today is the first day of Spring and while it's not quite spring weather here in St. Louis, we're out of the woods on the super cold winds that had us indoors for far too long. Being indoors is ok as long as you can find something to do, and lucky for us, we have the woodshop to keep us going. Here's some of the projects we've worked on since the year began.

Scrap Lamp
As always, the shop is teeming with scraps from various projects just waiting to be useful so we designed this lamp. Made from cutoffs of oak, walnut, cedar, spruce and a few others—and lots of glue—we turned this down on the lathe and finished it off with shellac. The hardest part was coming up with a lampshade we like dot pair with it, but finally hit pay dirt and we're pretty pleased with it.

And here's my shopmate demonstrating how one shade was too big.

Vertical Hat Rack
We were lucky enough to come into some reclaimed oak from a family member who's renovating their kitchen. The request that came with it was that we make a vertical hat rack with the wood. The fun part was that the board and all of the pegs came from the same piece of oak that had been in that kitchen for the last bit of forever. Not many pics for this one, maybe the owner will send some pics my way (hint hint)

Treasure Chest
My shopmate's birthday was late last month and he's really been into pirates as of late, which suits me just fine. He had drawn up a plan for this chest earlier in the year so I thought I'd surprise him by building it one weekend. Completely constructed from old pine 2x4s that I planed down and ripped into smaller planks, it's finished off with a layered paint job. Black paint went down first and then was sanded down to expose the grain and knots. Over that a walnut stain darkened and richened the wood and finally shellac brought out the shine and richness. We've got some good build pics, but the final pic is a bit 'meh', so maybe we'll circle back with a better one after a bit.